The order of things is becoming increasingly hard to remember (it’s especially difficult since The Pedant and I do the same handful of things almost every time we’re together – eat, fuck, watch DVDs, and sleep – so his individual visits really tend to blend together…). But I think The Pedant and I woke up at about the same time and I made us some breakfast and then we sat in my bed talking for a while. Not about typical Pedantry like politics or sociological ephemera. Personal/emotional stuff like our dating experiences and our opinions on polyamory.

I got up the nerve to explain the 5 Love Languages concept to him and ask which ones are most important to him. He didn’t get wigged out by the question (I had worried that the phrase “love languages” would make him think I was hinting around for a commitment or something) but he didn’t have a good answer for it, either. He said he doesn’t really feel as though any of them apply to him – that as long as he knows someone cares about him they don’t need to do anything to show it. And I was like “But how do you know someone cares about you? They have to do something, and whatever that something is, it’ll fall under one of the Languages. If they tell you outright, for instance, then that would be Words of Affirmation.” He said when someone cares, he just knows; I asked how that could possibly be when he’s always telling me he’s no good at reading people’s cues. I asked him how he’s known in the past that someone has cared about him. He said it was obvious his ex girlfriend cared about him because she was wanting to see him all the time and when they weren’t together she was texting him all the time* and I think he mentioned some other stuff but I forget. So I think I was right in guessing that one of his main languages is Quality Time, but then again he barely seems to know what he wants so how can I?

I asked him about compliments and he confirmed my suspicion that they do nothing for him. I was like “So is it not important to you that a partner finds you attractive?” and he was like “Well yeah, I do want to be found attractive. I just don’t feel like words mean anything.” I said “So how can you know your partner finds you attractive, then?” He smirked at me and said “Constant groping is usually a dead giveaway.” And we both looked over at my hand, which had been lightly gliding over his ass-cheeks for the past five minutes, and I sputtered with mock outrage.

Sometime during this conversation, The Pedant mentioned in passing that he’d recently been on a couple of dates with some chick (but it didn’t work out because she’s looking for monogamy). He used to yap on about other women all the damn time, but hasn’t in a while, and it seemed unlikely that he was refraining out of politeness; he’s well aware that most women don’t like hearing about their “competition” but has always yapped on about it anyway, and I only bothered stopping him if he said stuff while we were actually having sex. But no, I guess he’s been dating around, after all. And so I went ahead and threw some of my recent adventures into conversation – a little bit so he’d know I’m not all hung up on him, yes, but mostly because in the past he’s been really awesome to vent to about boy troubles and I’ve missed that. It kinda sucked keeping all my dating mishaps to myself.

At another point in the conversation, The Pedant found a mysterious smear of blood on his index fingertip and ultimately traced it to a zit behind his ear that he’d absent-mindedly scratched a moment before. I looked back there and was like “Jesus, dude, you’re bleeding like a stuck pig!” (a slight exaggeration. But there was more blood than I would have expected). The Pedant was like “Yeah, sometimes blood vessels run close to the surface and if you scratch a zit, the blood vessels get ruptured.” I gave him an incredulous look and said “Yeeeah…I’m aware of how bleeding works.” He glossed right over my incredulity without comment, and now I’m wishing I’d gone with something a bit stronger like “Did you seriously just mansplain to me that bleeding is caused by broken blood vessels?”

The Pedant grouched about the fact that adolescent problems and old-people problems can overlap (like the fact that he has a receding hairline and still gets pimples). I told him that in my experience, signs of aging start waaaaay sooner than anyone tells you they will. And I told him how I was only 23 when I noticed that my boobs were lower than they used to be. The Pedant squinted at them speculatively (we were both naked, as usual) and said something like “But they sit high up now. Where the hell were they before?”

I sat up straight, pressed my palms against my upper chest, and pulled the skin upward until my nipples were hoisted up half an inch or so. “Maybe around there?” I said. “Not a huge difference, I guess, but still.”

The Pedant scoffed and said “So what you’re telling me is that at 23, you finally got woman-breasts. Because, seriously, your ‘before’ makes me think of a girl I fooled around with when I was eighteen – and she was a couple of years younger than I was.” I laughed and told him that I was going to think of it like teeth from now on – I got my “baby boobs” at 16 and then my “adult boobs” came in at 23. Yay, I’m a big girl now! The Pedant reiterated that my rack really is just womanly – filled out and settled in, kind of, but not sagging by any stretch of the imagination.

The Pedant doesn’t generally give compliments in a typical format – he’s more likely to say “you’re not [negative thing]” than “you are [positive thing],” and usually he’ll somehow work in a reference to someone else he slept with**, but he really is a sweet boy. In his own, special way. 😛

Sex happens in the next post.

*…Which made me want to blurt out “Wait…you only want to see me every few weeks and you’re not texting me too often in between, so what does that mean?” …I wish I had said that, actually. It would’ve cleared the air. Plus I was feeling pretty resilient and could probably have handled bad news.

**Another example of this format: a different time The Pedant was over, I offhandedly mentioned that I’m pretty sure the people in the art classes I model for don’t realize how old I am (little things have happened, like I joked once about having a hot flash and a lady laughed dismissively and said “You’re not nearly old enough for that!” and someone else asking me if I was working my way through school). I said it’s pretty flattering that they’ve seen me naked and still assume I’m in my twenties or whatever. The Pedant was all “Yeah, no, you really don’t look your age. I’ve dated girls who were in their mid-20s and looked older than you do…” and here he devolved into a very specific comparison of these women’s boob and ass perkiness and overall BMI to mine that made me feel kind of scrutinized and dissected and I quickly changed the subject. But I appreciated the overall sentiment.